I’m still recovering from the weekend, but this week is off to a really great start. I put together a short list of books for the 5th grade teachers at school, who are getting new class sets of 3 novels next year and asked for my help picking them. The short list I gave them included When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead,Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, and After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson. A couple of those are long shots, but they were looking mainly for Newbery books (I threw in TLT because, well, I love it). There are tons of books out there, and tons that I haven’t read, but this was a list of recent books I’ve read and enjoyed, and I think our students would, too. I made up a packet with blurbs and reviews for each book, so that was productive and pretty fun.

I haven’t touched the Rainbow Quilt in at least a week, but that hasn’t stopped me from drooling over the new Riley Blake collection Rainy Days and Mondays by Melinda and Beccabury. I may possibly have ordered some half yards today…in several colorways.

Thank you, Fabric Shopper, for giving me the heads up that these were out!

Also, thanks to today’s post from Eat Cake Be Merry, I found Meri Meri cake decorations. I’m ordering these race car cupcake decorations since we’ve talked about throwing a Formula One party this year. How fabulous are these? They have such cute themes.

And last but definitely not least, my blog has a totally new look. This is entirely due to the genius of my husband, who finished this weeks-long project while I was typing up this post. He also took the photo and did the dots, I found the font (pointy). This site has needed a facelift for a while, and I love the new look. But it took removing some cookies from my files to see the changes on my machine, hopefully no one else has that problem. This was the old look, just as a reminder.